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WASHINGTON -- One of the country's largest overseers of troubled home loans, Nationstar Mortgage Holdings, is quietly trying to sell a $100 million insurance agency that doesn't appear to exist.

Harwood Service Co. has no website, no independent offices and only a single registered agent. The switchboard operators at Nationstar's headquarters in Lewisville, Texas, haven't heard of Harwood. Call-center employees of Assurant, the insurance carrier whose policies Harwood sells, say the company is just a name used to refer Nationstar business.

Only one thing justifies Harwood's nine-figure price tag: The ethereal company has long collected commissions on high-priced insurance that Nationstar compels otherwise-uninsured homeowners to buy. If homeowners can't pay for this "force-placed" coverage, Nationstar forecloses on their homes and sends the bill to mortgage bond investors.

New rules by the Federal Housing Finance Agency, investigations by state regulators and class-action settlements now prohibit servicers from collecting commissions on such insurance policies, and the country's biggest brand-name banks have renounced the practice.

Skirting the Rules

But some large subprime-mortgage servicers appear to be trying to skirt those rules. They are selling or have sold the nearly nonexistent insurance agencies or have already made profitable business arrangements to try to comply with the new rules.

The multimillion-dollar deals illustrate how regulators are still wrestling with messy banking practices more than six years after the housing market's collapse. They also mean that newly sold insurance subsidiaries have an incentive to compel struggling homeowners to buy costly policies, to justify the high sales prices commanded when the insurance agencies were sold.

Harwood collected more than $40 million last year on more than $200 million worth of insurance billed to homeowners, according to two people familiar with Nationstar's confidential sales pitch for the business but who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss it.

Force-placed insurance is a type of backup property insurance meant to protect mortgage investors' stake in uninsured properties. Standard mortgages require borrowers to maintain homeowners insurance and authorize the loan's servicer to buy coverage when borrowers don't. If the borrowers don't pay for the new insurance, servicers foreclose on their properties and stick the bill to mortgage investors.

Nationstar's first attempt to sell its affiliated insurance agency fell through early this month after The Associated Press raised questions about the deal, prompting New York's Department of Financial Services to take a look. Nationstar is still seeking to sell the insurance agency, said one person who is familiar with its efforts and requested anonymity to discuss its business affairs without authorization to do so publicly.

Nationstar declined to discuss details of Harwood's business.

In court, however, Nationstar has opted not to fight to defend its arrangements. Earlier this month, Nationstar and Assurant reached a deal to settle a class-action lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida that alleged Harwood existed solely to "funnel profits" to Nationstar at borrowers' expense.

It's unclear how or whether the Federal Housing Finance Agency, the industry's principal U.S. regulatory agency in Washington, will respond to such sales. In a statement, it expressed concern about the deals. But it said it could not stop servicers from selling their insurance agencies, even as it said it would work with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac if the companies were circumventing the new rules.

The nation's third-largest servicing company, Walter Investment Management, disclosed in its Securities and Exchange Commission filings that rules banning commissions will cost it roughly $20 million a year and said it was "actively looking at alternatives" to giving up the cash. A spokeswoman, Whitney Finch, declined to explain further but said the company would comply with all rules and regulations.

In an Irish bond prospectus filed last year, Carrington's parent company disclosed that a buyer had paid it $21.25 million in late 2012. If Carrington doesn't send back at least that amount to the agency's buyer in commissions, it will have to give back some of the money it received.

Carrington executives denied that its obligation to deliver $21.25 million of commissions would in any way affect homeowners or mortgage investors, and noted that it is not subject to the finance agency rules because it services loans owned by private investors. In its Irish prospectus, however, Carrington warned that some regulators believe the commissions "may constitute an improper 'kickback,' " and added: "Should any regulator decide to take action, we may be forced to pay restitution."

Swiss bank UBS blames a rogue trader at its London office for a $2.3 billion loss that is Britain's biggest-ever fraud at a bank. Kweku Adoboli, the 32 year old trader, is sentenced to seven years in prison. Britain's financial regulator fines UBS after finding its internal controls were inadequate and allowed Adoboli, a relatively inexperienced trader, to make vast and risky bets.

The case has echoes of Societe Generale trader Jerome Kerviel, who hid €5 billion in losses. Kerviel said SocGen turned a blind eye to his colossal positions in late 2007 and early 2008 as long as they made money for the bank.

Wells Fargo Bank agrees to pay at least $175 million to settle U.S. Department of Justice accusations that it discriminated against qualified African-American and Hispanic borrowers from 2004 through 2009. The department said the bank's discriminatory lending practices resulted in more than 34,000 African-American and Hispanic borrowers in 36 states and the District of Columbia paying higher rates for loans solely because of the color of their skin.

JPMorgan Chase announces a loss of $2 billion from a trade that was meant to protect the bank if the global economy sharply deteriorated. Later, losses from the bad trade swell to nearly $6 billion and shave much more from the company's stock market value. The episode heightens concerns that the biggest banks still pose risks to the U.S. financial system, less than four years after the financial crisis.

Barclays agrees to pay more than $450 million to U.S. and British regulators to settle charges that it attempted to manipulate a global benchmark interest rate known as LIBOR. The rate indirectly affect the costs of hundreds of trillions of dollars in loans that people pay when they get loans to go to college, purchase a car or buy a house. Numerous other banks are under investigation for similar violations.

UBS pays $1.5 billion to settle LIBOR manipulation charges with regulators in the U.S., Britain and Switzerland. The bank says some of its employees tried to rig LIBOR in several currencies.

An independent review finds Kabul Bank spirited some $861 million out of war-torn Afghanistan in a massive fraud based on fake loans to 19 individuals and companies. A bailout of the bank costs the equivalent of 5 percent of Afghanistan's gross domestic product, making it one of world's largest banking failures ever.

HSBC, Europe's largest bank, says it's paying $1.9 billion in penalties to settle a U.S. money laundering probe. The investigation into HSBC focused on the transfer of billions of dollars on behalf of nations such as Iran and the transfer of money from Mexican drug cartels. The bank said its anti-laundering measures were inadequate and said it was "profoundly sorry."

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COMMON SENSE

WHY??? What happened on January 1st 2014:

Top Income tax bracket went from 35% to 39.6 % Top Income payroll tax went from 37.4% to 52.2 % Capital Gains tax went from 15% to 28 % Dividends tax went from 15% to 39.6 % Estate tax went from 0% to 55 % Remember this fact: if you have money, the democrats want it. These taxes were all passed only with democrat votes, no republicans voted for these taxes. These taxes were all passed under the affordable care act , aka Obamacare.